This Labour government is fascinatingly awful |
The eerie and the uncanny fascinate us, whether it’s the abominable snowman, the Loch Ness monster or the Bermuda Triangle. And now we have another great mystery to puzzle over: why is this Labour government so awful? What is it all for?
At the election I was not optimistic about Starmer’s mob, but I allowed myself a brief moment of wondering – even hoping, a bit – that I was wrong. What if Labour actually had the wits and the nerve to jolt Britain out of its decline? It seemed very unlikely, yes, though stranger things have happened.
This government is fascinatingly bad, in a way that attracts your wonder at the same as it repels
But in the end that wasn’t the case. What’s worse, Labour’s tiny, token efforts to address some of our biggest problems – the welfare bill, for example – have been reversed, usually at the behest of their own backbenchers. They have done so much that is bad in their short spell in office that we forget some of the really big terrible things; they get swallowed up in the ocean of awfulness. It’s very hard to keep up and keep the details fresh in the mind, because Labour are always moving on to another desecration.
We’ve all pretty much forgotten, for example, that Starmer removed the whip from MPs who rebelled against his welfare cuts – but then........